Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ames!killer!texbell!tness1!sugar!ssd
From: ssd@sugar.uu.net (Scott Denham)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran
Subject: Re: Fortran 88
Summary: 8X, standards, general purpose
Keywords: fortran standards
Message-ID: <2870@sugar.uu.net>
Date: 20 Oct 88 18:04:29 GMT
References: <2045@unmvax.unm.edu> <657@convex.UUCP> <660@convex.UUCP> <15744@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Distribution: comp.lang.fortran
Organization: Sugar Land Unix - Houston, TX
Lines: 45

In article <15744@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, link@stew.ssl.berkeley.edu (Richard Link) writes:
> *MY* biggest problem with F88 is that it looks like FORTRAN was
> hijacked by a bunch of academic Pascal/C advocates who insist on
> turning it into an all-purpose language, instead of the efficient
> number cruncher it was designed to be.
> 
Now I'm certainly not defending the 8x standard as it exists today, but 
I do think that FORTRAN needs to become more of an "all-purpose" language
than it is in it's present form, if it is to survive.  Consider the 
dilemma the company I work for faces :  We have two "types" of FORTRAN
coders - researchers, who are trying to invent and refine new whiz-bang
techniques to find oil, and development programmers, who are attempting to
incorporate the good ideas of these researchers into stable, efficient,
user-friendly, veratile code (for the most part, the researcher's code is
none of these things).  These code segments must be merged into a much
larger system that requires a lot of "computer scientist" sort of tricks
(E.G. pointers, dynamic arrays, etc).  We currently do all of this in 
FORTRAN, but only through severe abuse of the published standard. In this
form, FORTRAN can hardly be considered portable.  So we need a language 
that is acceptable to the researchers, but allows us to build the whole
system without making it so machine-dependent that we are trapped to a
specific hardware platform.  A FORTAN 8X-like language would go a long way
towards solving this problem. Sure, we could try to convert the whole thing
to "C", but that would involve retraining about 95% of the people that have
to work with the code. 
Clearly, a more "modern" FORTRAN is the answer.  FORTRAN 66 was great,
until the underlying systems got more complex and the expectations of the
end user got higher (E.G. decent looking reports - much assisted by F77).
So the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" argument doesn't carry very far
with us.  On the other hand, making it so complex that it would be 
SIMPLER to convert it to "C" or (gasp) ADA is certainly no solution 
either.  FORTRAN needs to grow up some. 
> 
> To ANSI committee members: Go think about it for a while, and come back
> when you have a language called FORTRAN.
> 
> Dr. Richard Link

RIGHT!!  Just be sure it's not still called FORTRAN 77 !!
 
 Scott Denham 
 Western Atlas International
 Houston, TX

The opinions experess herein are my own; my employer's only opinion is 
 that they have no opinion.